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mmoxie · 7 years

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Moxie, I was just reading a thread on the WoW forums about how the character of night elves has changed over time (specifically how they seem to be moving further and further away from the 'savage warriors' described in early materials, and more towards pacifism), and one of the comments mentioned that this might not have happened if night elves were part of the Horde instead. If you're interested in talking about this, what do you think would have had to be different (cont)

(cont) historically/politically for Night Elves and Forsaken to have swapped factions, and how do you think that would impact the dynamic of Horde vs. Alliance and the structure of WoW as a whole?

Well, I have to hand it to you for making the exact correct choice in who to swap. I want to talk about the Forsaken being part of the Alliance a little bit first.

Can you imagine the propaganda? The Alliance has always been a war machine- but now the folks on the front lines never have to sleep. I can’t imagine anything more emboldening for the Alliance than them finding out that Lordaeron is ETERNAL. Plus, on the domestic side, there’s so much genuine heart-warming magic to be found in families being reunited after the nightmare of the Scourge, welcoming back grandparents and parents they thought lost, preserving their history through eyewitness accounts.

By the Light, it’d be an absolute nightmare. Humanity would be entirely too strong if they welcomed the Forsaken with open arms- probably referring to them as Dearly Departed- or informally, just Departed- since, well... they haven’t been forsaken, in this scenario, but they have died. The Forsaken are the biggest boon to the Alliance that I can think of, and the Alliance that they create terrifies me.

With an Alliance like that, thank Elune that the Night Elves are part of the Horde.

Now let’s get to the meat of this issue: How do Night Elves interact with the Horde? What changes about them? What changes about the Horde?

It starts with the Tauren, when the Orcs arrive. The Night Elves and the Tauren have never had particularly good due cause to fight. They’re both people of nature and they both have a particular way of living, with neither getting in the way of the other- but these Orcs need a lot. Land, resources, access to regional politics and commerce. And they need allies, not more enemies. They just escaped from their worst enemies so far, the humans.

It’s the compassion of the Tauren that keeps the Night Elves from doing something rash. The Orcs head for the trees to get what they need, and the Night Elves nock their arrows- and the Tauren intervene.

“We will take them out of your woods,” the Tauren offer, “and show them where to hunt.”

The Elves aren’t necessarily impressed, but when have the Tauren steered them wrong? They’re skeptical about these Orcs- they’re the same color as the horrible magic that Azshara once pulled out of the Well. But they let the Tauren lead the Orcish party out of Ashenvale and back into Durotar.

They teach them about the thunder lizards, and how to cover their horn in sticky resin to smother the bursts of lightning. The Orcs can take it from there- they know how to tan hide. They start putting together encampments, and over time they get as familiar with Durotar’s game as any hunter that came before them.

Their quick adaptation impresses the Night Elves. Whatever this working relationship is between the Orcs and Tauren, it’s good for the land. Durotar is flourishing. Overpopulated species are getting hunted down to levels where other species can start recovering. They can hardly believe it, but the Orcs are bringing balance to the region.

And then the humans arrive, seeking allegiance. Presuming allegiance. Elves of other sorts have thrown their lot in with the Alliance, they expect sentinels to help them run down what’s left of Thrall’s Horde.

But the Night Elves hesitate. And then they say to the humans, “no.”

They like these orcs. They hunt well, they fight bravely, they’ve brought no war to Kalimdor. The presumptuous Alliance, on the other hand...

And so it comes to pass that Tyrande Whisperwind calls Cairne Bloodhoof and Thrall to her temple. Vol’jin doesn’t much approve of being left out of something as big as this, and convinces Thrall that he should come too. The Trolls aren’t really news to the Night Elves, for a number of reasons, but... Vol’jin doesn’t think his people are being given a fair shake by the regional powers-that-be. Now’s his chance.

So, with the Alliance pouting in their boats, straining their ears as hard as they can and getting nothing for their efforts, these four leaders have their meeting. Prayers are said, introductions are formally made, explanations are given- and then Tyrande proves herself to be a politician unlike the other three:

“When they want something, they send their vassals to me. And as a matter of the Moon’s own compassion, I make arrangements to give them what they need. But then I look at you, Thrall.”

She pauses, and gives him a long, scrutinizing squint. “You brought your people here, and you thought to take from us. Once. We were ready to defend ourselves and our forests that day, but you put your weapon down and you paid attention to the ground beneath your feet. You haven’t thought to take anything ever since. Haven’t even asked.”

She pauses again, leaning back in her chair and bobbing an ankle, looking as contemplative as a woman as old as the world should.

“I like that a lot better than a man who fills my harbors with his expectations.”

Cairne didn’t have anything to say. He simply exchanged a confirming nod with Tyrande, and Thrall joined him in quiet agreement. Vol’jin... simply had to get some things off of his chest. All this talk about the success of the Orcs- hadn’t his people also traveled far? Lived honorably? Worked hard for their claims?

He was a young troll in those days, with a fire in his belly and wearing his dignity like a crown. He felt slighted- weren’t his ears the same as hers? She never said a word about his people- how could he know what she thought of them?

But Tyrande was patient. It was refreshing for a great many reasons to have someone be so direct with her. She had a feeling that if they did form this Horde, it would be Vol’jin she relied on the most to keep her feet on the ground.

So she stood and smiled and reached out to him, and said, “If you wanted my attention so bad, you should have invited me to your isles.”

And as laughter rang out between the four of them, the Horde was formed in earnest.

The world would never know a more dedicated family, or a more incredible fighting force.

With their founding leaders becoming actual friends instead of just political allies, they always put their whole hearts into faction conflicts. The Night Elves found themselves learning from the Orcs- tanning and metalworking in the orcish fashion, practical placement of spikes, the rich history of their clans and the traditions that came with them. Likewise, the Night Elves learned from the Trolls in a different fashion- the lines blurred between their hunters and shadow hunters, the darkness of the moon’s own nighttime becoming an ally to all of them. Magic derived from the night was no different than that of nature, or the blood within one’s own body- new understandings were reached about what was natural and good, with all of them agreeing that the arcane and fel were vicious corrupters for which they had no use.

They began to build together. Elven stonework fortified towering Tauren buildings, surrounded by sprawls of Troll and Orc construction, bone and hide and metal and wood rising up in rings around central totems and towers and bluffs. There was still an Orgrimmar, still a Thunder Bluff, still a Darnassus, still the Echo Isles, but they came from all directions to the place where their trade routes all met- the Crossroads- and built something for every citizen of their new Horde.

This city that the Horde built was something the Alliance could never approach, let alone break. While humans built the tower of themselves higher and higher, the Horde’s cooperation and sense of family made them all as strong as each other.

The Night Elves’ sense of protectiveness over the forests spread further outward, to the territories of the Horde. The lands where they all hunted had to be protected. Where they tilled and slept and held their festivals were just as sacred as the woods.

When the Alliance comes seeking war, it’s the Night Elves they run into first. They get one warning- turn your ships back, or they will be sunk.

The Alliance does have its footholds, but they find themselves up against an enemy that is fueled by compassion. The Horde has what it needs, it only seeks to expand its territories when it absolutely must. Why can’t these interlopers from across the sea do the same?

But the Alliance keeps coming, and the Night Elves keep deflecting them.

The Night Elves joining the Horde ultimately creates a Horde that functions as a powerful, insular family, every tribe and clan is sacred, there is a space for every tradition. The Night Elves themselves have no need to turn away from their traditions as hunters, because they have allies in the Tauren to join their druids, and allies in the Orcs to join their hunts, and allies in the Trolls to do both.

They are never asked to compromise their spirituality in order to make peace with a political ally in the way that they might be if they belonged to the Alliance, and they are never asked to be part of something that is happening primarily on the other side of the world. Everyone they want to protect is right there in Kalimdor, right in the Horde they call home. Their closest allies nurture their own traditions and make them better at what they do. Knowing that they’re safe to do so, they even start rebuilding their ruins in Azshara and the surrounding areas.

It’ll be a while until the Lich King loses control of a large population of Scourge, and those wayward Undead are embraced by humanity.

When that happens, the Alliance incursions along the coasts of Kalimdor will become dramatically more... persistent. By that point, the Alliance will be so damn mad that they aren’t allowed in Kalimdor that they’ll pick a fight just for the sake of it.

And that’ll be another post. Goodnight.

#moxie ruins warcraft #long post //#cybersphynx9000

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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About Me - Life Story Part 1

Dear tumblr,

Every few years I introduce myself in some fashion, just to keep an updated version of myself current. This year i decided to retry giving an elaborated, but still somewhat brief outline of my life story so far. I did this a few years ago, and i probably did it better back then - but i didn’t finish. And i lost half of it and the rest is on a computer i don’t really use anymore. I will write this saga in segments as to not to explode the heads of anyone who wants to read it by taking up too much time at once, or overdoing information, and it give myself time to go through the different parts. So here goes part 1.

My name is Renee Clariss Sanborn. I was born and raised in rural northern Idaho in a town called Kendrick that was ¼ meth town, ¼th Garth Brooks/hunters/trucker land, 1/4th early 1900's antiquity, and ¼ woods with no people. My house was an antique historical monument that my father bought for my mother so they could fix up based on my mother's fantasies of fixing it up to be a place where socialites from all over the world might visit (nothing of the sort ever happened). The home even has it's own wikipedia page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kirby_House . I have two younger siblings, a brother and a sister, and two older half sisters, and 11 nieces and nephews, and two great nephews. I have a number of uncles and aunts too, but other than my grandmothers, I really have not spent a lot of time with most of them.

My father and mother met in a factory. My mom, Sandra, was very pretty and had spent most of her young life in an abusive marriage to her first husband. My father, Dave, was a failed musician, turned body builder, turned cocaine dealer. After a few years of a rocky relationship, my mother ended up getting pregnant, so my father stayed with her mostly based on that fact, and when I was three they moved us all out to Kendrick, with a population of 300 people.

My mom grew up near Couer de' Alene Idaho to a highly sociopathic and abusive father who made her and her mom and brother's lives hell. She also likely contracted lead poisoning since she lived for much of her time in a town called Smelterville where there has been very heavy lead poisoning due to the mines and stuff around that area. I don't really know what my mother was like when she was young other than she tended to follow boys around, soccer, and she sewed her own clothing. She did some modeling at a college for a short period, posing nude for artists to paint, though she never did go to college herself. My grandmother didn't like that and forced her to stop. My mom's first boyfriend took her up to Alaska when she was seventeen while they were building pipelines. She worked as a waitress at a strip club. She had my oldest sister up there, and shortly after her boyfriend ditched her. My mother refuses to say much about this time period, but from stories I have gathered from my family, the owner of the club was also a pimp, and he raped my mother and beat her and my sister Maria, and tried to force her to be a prostitute. I don't know the details of this situation, but when her and Maria escaped and came back to Idaho, they were both severely malnourished and bruised from head to toe.

My mom didn't really get along with the rest of her brothers and her own mom, and was a bit of the black sheep of the family. She moved down to Lewiston Idaho with Maria when she was nineteen. My mom, being apparently clueless, married the first man she saw in the first bar she applied to be a waitress on her first day looking for work in Lewiston. He was a very rich, older abusive drunk of a man. She stayed with him as a housewife for several years throughout the eighties, had my second half sister Roxanne, and eventually after ten years of marriage, she left him. A month later, she was working at the bullet manufacturing company and she met my dad.

My mom never really has felt love for men at all. She sees them as dumb creatures who are also dangerous who can pay your bills for you if you look good enough. So, that's how that worked out. My dad for whatever reason bought the shtick and after a few years of an on again off again relationship, and after finally having broken up permanently, was told that my mother was pregnant. Since my dad was kind of a fifties guy, he married my mom out of duty, and because he wanted to get out of disco-drug culture but didn't know how. So my existence was what more or less gave him reason to start life anew.

My dad never really knew his father. He has one very vague memory he says, of being in a highchair and seeing his father screaming at him because he would not eat the baby food on the spoon. My father's father, my grandfather I am told, was a very angry and abusive guy. They all lived in southern California. My grandfather Robert was a sailor, and my grandmother Betty who's father was a member of the mafia, but we never knew who he really was (a different story for a different day), was raised by nuns and for her entire life, both chain smoked continuously, and was absolutely phobic of just about everything. For this reason, she never learned to drive. She would cry hysterically when it rained. She talked the way fifties women should talk, only she had a slightly more baby-talk way of speaking. Anyway, my grandfather was a very physically abusive man, and it's been suggested that he was probably bipolar. But he didn't really live long enough to figure much out. He was hit by a drunken semi driver who went in the wrong lane. And so my father and his family packed up and moved to Lewiston Idaho.

My dad grew up without a father, and so he followed his older brother Bob around, who was and is highly intelligent and also quite criminal. There was always a rivalry between him and Bob, with Bob always being jealous of Davy. This is only notable, in that it came to shape who my father was. My dad was one of those very simple 50's boys who actually needed a father in his life. I don't believe that all boys 'need' dads, and I think that can be a very outdated idea that implies that male influence is better than women's, or that family structures have to have that patriarchy in them. But my dad longed for a male figure to look up to. Behind a lot of his attitude throughout his life, I think that underneath it all he is still trying to live up to some invisible male expectation that was never laid out for him.

In the late 60's, my dad became one of the few kids in the town of Lewiston to be a hippie. This was a very big deal, and he got into a lot of fights for it, for having long hair. He did LSD over three hundred times before he turned 17. He became a bassist in a band that played a sort of New York Dolls style of music, though they mostly did covers. After high school they toured all over the north west and were considered quite a popular act in their day, considering the scarcity of that kind of music in the inland north west. After three or four years however, the entire band had gotten very much into drugs, and were not able to keep a tight ship. My dad has always been sort of a fool about people. He cannot tell when people are his friends, he tends to act in a way to play all his cards. He also is very extroverted, at times quarrelsome and overbearing. So they likely started to play him like a fool. My father bought most of the instruments and speakers with money he inherited when he was 18 from a trust fund set up because of his father's death. They stole his instruments and they kicked him out of the band.

He cut his hair and at some point developed a taste for body building and Huey Lewis and the News. He applied at the local bullet factory that paid well, and after ten or so years of dealing coke and being a steroids taking self centered – and most likely totally dickish asshole, he met my mother and decided that was a good idea for whatever reason. (I apologize for my thinking that my parents relationship, and my birth were terrible ideas).

So my oldest sister Maria, who is eleven years older than me has some serious mental health problems. She displays very strong signs of Borderline Personality Disorder. I am not diagnosing her per say, but from what I have read, she really does fit all the criteria. My mom for whatever reason decided to distribute love very unevenly among her children (my mother also has some serious issues). Maria had it the worst. My mother's first husband hated Maria and made her life a fearful hell, Maria's own father didn't want anything to do with her, and my father was also abusive to her. My mom would literally push Maria away when she was a child and needed a hug. This really affected Maria for the worst. She stopped going to the bathroom on the toilet, and this was when she was eight. She started lying and stealing compulsively. And my mom kept shipping Maria off to other families, other friends from work, whoever she could con into taking Maria, some of these families also being abusive. It was very clear that my mom just didn't want Maria.

My dad came into the picture, and he being an aggressive dummy – particularly in those times, would make a habit of whipping her whenever she wet herself. This went on this way till she was twelve. Maria tried to commit suicide when she was eleven by drinking a bottle of rubbing alcohol. My mom found out, but even then, my crazily cold mother didn't seem to care. My dad did care, but he and my mother were both horrible about this, and instead chalked all of this behavior up as just ways to get their 'attention' as though that were something Maria didn't deserve, and she was scolded for her suicide attempt. I honestly, for the life of me cannot understand why nobody in my family took Maria to see a mental health professional. Instead, she was further ostracized and resented until she ran off when she was fifteen.

This behavior from my mom and dad's part really goes to show what kind of cold selfish people the two of them can be. It's confusing because they are not always this cruel, there seems to be random bursts of care at random times. It's hard to explain. But I have seen this side to my parents. I use this as a reference because anything I might say from personal experience is bound to be a bias interpretation. Maria's case is clear cut abuse and I can site it to make my point when I need to.

Roxanne, my second oldest half sister had a much different life than Maria. Roxanne was very hyper and giggly. She was my mother's pride and joy. She would go on to spoil Roxanne terribly. Buying her whatever she wanted on a whim. She was considered everything Maria was not. Maria grew up with this little impish angel dancing around her, and Maria grew to hate Roxanne to the point of putting Roxanne in some very dangerous situations hoping she could get Roxanne maimed in some way. Roxanne was also one of those little children that wants to start dating when they are kindergartners. I grew up with Roxanne as a sort of role model in some ways. She always seemed really cool to me. I didn't have her energy though. I also had a different father, and was raised under different circumstances. I was always fearful where she was always foolishly fearless. She was tall and thin, where I was clumsy and pudgy. Roxanne would laugh on a roller coaster, and I would always cry. In this way, we were just very different. The similarities are mostly in our facial structure – out of all my siblings, I look like her the most I think. And I tried very hard to be a cool 90's girl like her.

When Roxanne was thirteen, her father's girlfriend sent photos of her to seventeen magazine. They accepted her, and for a short while, it looked like Roxanne was going to be a model. But at the same time, Roxanne had been sleeping with boys and partying. She was only twelve when she started doing this. I remember very vividly that we shared a room. Roxanne would always torture me in some fashion, but then she would wait till she thought I was asleep, and she would climb out the window and off into the night to go do god knows what. I never told on her.

So, at age twelve, she got pregnant. It was kept as a secret from my father for a time, but then he found out and all hell finally broke loose completely in the family. My father didn't feel like Roxanne had any business raising children and thought she should put the baby up for adoption. Roxanne wanted to keep the baby and my mother stood by her on this decision. On top of this, my mother had stopped working for a few years around this time and had ran up 80,000 dollars in debt – mostly on things you order on television and clothing for Roxanne. So my dad was working constantly trying to keep up with my mom's spending. She simply would not stop. They had half finished fixing up the old house, but it was clear at this point that half done was all it would ever be. Also, my mom had my brother and sister as babies around that time, so that added to the stress of it all. Maria had caused fights until she moved away to live with her boyfriend. I had had a brother William who, due to a drunken doctor, was born brain dead and died five days later in the hospital. This loss kind of ruined my parent's marriage. It was all just crumbling.

So there was a bitter war in the house, and general tension that my dad would explode. Roxanne had grown to hate my father for being the meathead who tried to keep a patriarchal order in the home who called the cops on her when she ran off to do drugs for days at a time. My mother resented my father because he didn't like her spending, because he talks constantly and over everyone else (he still does), and he never seemed to listen at all, and by this time it was clear that I was his favorite person in the family, so at six, though I was not aware of it at the time, I was resented by my sister and my mom.

So, what happened next, during this time was, Roxanne made up a story that my father had molested her when she was young. It was shocking, and it caused a lot of problems for my personal morals – not knowing the truth of the situation until I got much older and Roxanne confessed that she lied. This basically made my father evil in my mother's eyes. So, she kicked him out of the house. And then my mother drove off to party. My dad was living in a camper somewhere at this time, working three jobs, still paying the bills. Roxanne had accused him of the most foulest crime ever. It was really something.

At this point, I want to take a step back though and explain that even though this sounds bad, and in some ways for me it was, I personally did not live this life that everyone else had chosen for themselves. My personal world was quite magical and I was not fully affected by the circumstances in my family.

From my perspective, my mother was always distant. This might have affected the kind of nurturing person I am, or rather, am not. I felt very distant from my own femininity because I didn't really get allowed in the female circle of my family. I was pushed away, and this essentially made my father the major influencer over me. I am not like other girls. I don't know why, but I think it is because of my mother's lack of involvement with me whatsoever after age three. She didn't play with me, hug me, or talk to me. I remember her as a silent statue while my father just blabbered and blabbered. It may be one of those mysterious favoritisms my mother has, but it might have simply been that she resented that my dad loved me more than he did her or her other daughters. In any case, it wasn't my fault. She favored Roxanne over me, and so having been rejected by the mother figure, I went to my dad for reassurance. This kind of set the stage I think for how I am able to fit in in female social circles as a whole. I have female friends in my life, but they are never like other female friends. And the girls I hang out with have always been social outcasts. And I usually feel like an outcast even to them.

However, my mother was good at providing me with a sort of homemade way of living. She sewed half my clothes, which were generally frilly old fashioned outfits. Half my toys were actually antiques. I was taught to pick up after myself. I became quite organized. Breakfast was made for me every morning on an antique tray, that I would take into my antique table, and chair, and I would eat my meal and then put it outside the door. I was very self sufficient when I was young and I never got bored. The bread we ate was homemade. She was really good this kind of thing. I think growing up in an old house, with a wood stove, with old fashioned furniture, clothing, living in a town of old fashioned brick buildings with old men that still dressed like it was the 20's gave me this really strong sense of bygone eras. I was somewhat immersed in antiquity from a young age.

My best friend in the world growing up was actually my grandma. Until age five, my phobic chain-smoking afraid-of-everything grandma lived in a few upstairs rooms in the house. She always owned cats. She always smelled like cigarettes. I would visit her just about every other day and we would watch Bob Ross, and Mr. Rogers. I used to hold her hand and push on her big mushy veins. When the weather was bad, my mom and dad would not let me near her door, knowing that she was secretly crying in fear. I only found out later what was happening. She had two cats, Stanley and Booker. My father hated cats back then, and he resented her love of animals. My grandma Betty, and my mother however, did not get along. My dad didn't agree with either one of them, but they put him in the middle of their squabble. Eventually, my grandma moved to live with my dad's younger brother Steve. It was very hard for me, and my family didn't tell me till she already moved.

I had a lot of structure when I was young. I do remember the sorrow in the house when William died. That kind of changed things. But everyone was quite nice to me, aside from Roxanne, who delighted in picking on me. I had a friend up the street named Colt, who would come to my house and we would make mudpies. There was a public pool that was open in the summers, and a creek that ran through the town. It was a beautiful place to grow up when you were very small. The old people that my grandma Betty would sometimes visit down at the diner would always dote over me, in my antique style dresses my mother sewed for me. I remember these days very positively.

I mostly looked forward to my father coming home after work. I used to eat dirt for some reason and I think I got worms at some point for this. I found scissors one time as well, and I chopped half my hair off. My mother had to chop off the other side to make it even, and I cried thinking I looked just like a boy. I used to play games where I made ants have competitions to see which one could live the longest in water. It was probably the meanest thing I ever did. I was generally a very calm and well behaved child. There were only three times I ever got into trouble. The first one was, I decided I wanted to be a black person. I am not sure at all where this came to me. I just felt that I should be black. I didn't know anyone who was black. I just thought black skin looked better. I just felt like my family didn't understand me for this. I decided I was going to change my skin color with dirt. I realize this story might seem kind of racist to anyone reading it, but I am attempting to just be honest about what happened, I was four and I didn't mean anything at all to be insulting, other than having an honest need to change the color of my skin. I wasn't trying to be funny. I seriously thought mud would do the trick somehow. I got naked, went outside, filled up a basin with mud, and completely soaked myself in it. Then I proceeded to walk around covered from head to toe in mud naked in broad daylight down the street. My father came home from work, he saw me and I not only got hosed down with cold water that made me cry, I also got whipped. My dad is racist too, so he probably indoctrinated me with some terrible bullshit to defer me from wishing I had dark skin.

Aside from my mother buying things online, she also would buy animals we could not take care of, birds, fish, iguanas, cats, dogs, pigs. We'd keep them for a short while, before they would eventually die or we would have to get rid of them. She never would talk to my dad about it at all. She would just wake up one morning and buy the animal. My dad would come home and there we would have three iguanas, or a new dog, or whathaveyou. We had a pig for a short time named Angie. Angie was my friend. I would pet her and feed her popcorn. She was a very sweet little pig. Eventually my father got rid of her, selling her to essentially be slaughtered. After this I refused to eat meat. I didn't know that meat was animal flesh until that point where it was explained to me by Roxanne, and it took a a lot of firm punishment to get me to eat meat after that. I eventually did of course go back to the brainwashed world of meat eating, but I never really forgot it entirely, which is why I eventually went vegan as an adult as soon as I was able to as an adult.

The third thing I did was uncharacteristic of me and shocked my family. My best friend Colt had a cousin named Carrie. Carrie was very well liked by the adults. All the kids wanted to play with her. She lived far away, so her visitation was also taken as a celebration. Even Roxanne liked her over me. She said so herself. I remember sitting off away from everyone else by the trees. Carrie wasn't mean to me or anything, but I remember feeling like I needed to set things right in some way. I felt like Carrie threatened my place I guess. I was instantly left out the second she came to visit. I was a very introverted child and I didn't know how else to get attention other than to be at the right place at the right time. So I went and found a big stick. It might have been Carrie's birthday, I cannot quite remember. I walked straight up to her friendly smiling face, and I remember mindlessly whacking her as hard as I could in the face with the stick. The funniest thing about this incident is that I was not mad at Carrie. I did not do this aggressive thing because I was mad at her. I remember feeling compelled, but not by strong emotions. Which was why I was equally confused when everyone around me began scolding me. It even confused me why Carrie was crying. Nobody could understand why I did what I did. I didn't feel guilty because I didn't understand it either. It just happened. Everyone around me was angry at me or in shock. I just felt confused by the entire event.

A week before I started school, my friend Colt (who moved at the end of that summer), convinced me to put a bead up my nose. I remember it very well. It was a pretty red sparkly one. I put it up my nose, and I could not get it out. Eventually Roxanne found out, then my mother. Everyone did everything they could but it was lodged into the very back of my nostril at this point. So I was driven forty miles to the hospital, where they used some strange doctor's equipment and pulled it out. I remember feeling very relieved. A week later, I turned five. My father found this obscure Japanese cartoon that I fell in love with – which just so happened to be Totoro. They took me all the way up to Spokane to Chucky Cheese (which wasn't really as fun as I had hoped – all the kids seemed really wild and the pizza was sub par). It felt like the rites of initiation.

Anyway, school officially sucked. Kindergarten was probably the hardest year of school I ever had. My grandmother had moved away. Maria had moved out, and despite being a pain to the family or whatever, she was actually quite sweet to me, always letting me look at her stuff, she would read the bible to me, teach me cheesy songs by guns 'n' roses. I didn't really know about how often she stole, or lied. I didn't know about the orgies or how she ripped up her papers in class. I thought Maria was a beautiful princess. Anyway, she was gone. My grandmother had moved. Colt moved away as well. He had been my best friend for two yeas of my short life, and he was gone. I had just gotten a bead pulled out of my nose.

Maria had me watch Crybaby for the first time. I was enchanted. At five I was madly in love with Johnny Depp in Crybaby. I didn't see it as a satire, or a comedy. I thought of it as a really intense romance. I was absolutely obsessed and consumed by any passion that a very little girl that I was could possibly feel for someone. I was probably more in love with Johnny Depp than my parents had ever been with each other if I am going to be honest. My mom, though obsessed with her boyfriends, has never actually been in love at all. I am not sure she really actually likes men, or trusts them. And my father is not a romantic person. I think by definition he would be considered aromantic by scales of sexuality/gender/and romantic inclination. He just sees utility in human interaction and no poetry at all. I kept trying to draw Johnny Depp over and over. I also by extension thought Elvis was pretty nice too. It was never good enough. I was a bit of a perfectionist. I remember crying because my drawings kept looking like a typical ungifted child's drawings. I wanted to make adult art. I was not capable of it. I remember the frustration. But it was this early age that I decided I wanted to grow up to be creative. I realized that with art, you can take the beautiful things in the actual world, and you can insulate them and pack them together into music, stage, words, and pages of lines and color. And you can study those beautiful things and work with them in their purity in a way that life rarely provides the opportunity for.

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